For single travellers I highly recommend keeping a blog. It will help keep you sane when you have no-one to sound ideas off. I did find myself going slightly crazy from time to time. Here is just a couple of my extractshttp://www.thisordinarylife.blogspot.com

INDIA - KOLKATA

...Traffic here is a hoot! The buses are the most dilapidated I've ever seen. They've been beaten and flogged to within an inch of their useful lives but against all odds, still seem to run. They show their battlescars of countless collisions and yet people pile onto them. The trams are alike. The guidebook says that they haven't changed much in their 150yr service but if you had any image of some quaint tram like in, say, San Francisco well, you can get that thought out of your head immediately. They look....... evil. Not of this world – a skeleton of a tram – a ghost. There are no windows, no doors, every corner has been beaten into a reluctant chamfer and yet they still continue to run. You could drop the H-Bomb on Kolkata and all that would be left would be flies and trams!!

Some of the cars that come out of the showrooms actually get blessed by clerics. This is a bonafide ritual. The priest mumbles a few incoherent words, spashes water onto the bonnet, burns some incense and wafts it around the extremes of the car and then the driver is ready to face the traffic. I understand that driving here requires all the help you can get but relying on divine intervention is pushing it a bit. Personally, I'd like something a little more concrete than that.Other alternatives included the ubiquitous tuk-tuk, tri-shaws and the hand pulled rickshaws. These were supposedly outlawed but you just try telling the city slum dwellers that. Often it is the only way that they can make a living and they tend to live short, very hard lives. Scant, lean men pushing their bodies in ways that aren't entirely of a humanitarian nature. I never used them.Finally, you had the Metro. It's clean, it worked, it is of course horrendously packed and for some bizarre reason, you can't take photos on it. A regulation so stringently adhered to that there are guards both at the station entrances and on the ticket floors ready to insist on removing that battery from the camera. Apparently it's OK to eat and drink and shit and piss down there but god forbid should you want to photograph any of it. Despite all this, it is the best and most economical way to get around the city. Just 4Rp (about 5p!!) can get you out of this particular brand of madness and into a totally different kind of madness altogether.

MOROCCO - FEZ

I returned to my hotel and there in the lobby was the guy who'd found me the hotel in the first place. He smiled a broad, toothless grin at me and asked if I would still like to have tea with his family? Frankly I was feeling pretty good about myself. I'd managed to do all that I wanted and got most of it posted home too. I had a couple of hours left in the evening so yeah, why not. I took up his offer and we both left the building.

Now, I don't wish to be quite so paranoid but it does cross your mind: I don't know anything about this guy. I don't know where he is taking me, I don't know where I'm going or what to expect and on the face of it, it would seem a pretty reckless thing to do. Normally at this moment the worst of those paranoid scenarios would start to creep into my head. I made strong, mental notes of the route. That worked for a while but as the journey became more convoluted I became more anxious as details of directions slipped away. Next thing I wondered was; could I outrun him? Yes - I could. He was older and worn out. His thin frame and tired muscles would be no match for a fit and healthy guy. I could probably take him too if it came down to it but I couldn't consider those thoughts entirely necessary. The thing was; I liked him instinctively . I didn't really feel the fear that something bad was about to go down and instinct can come in bloody handy sometimes. Then I countered that on the upside, this could be a real experience that I wasn't going to find in any guidebook. Turned out that instinct won that day. We walked from main road to side road, from side road to back street and back street to alleyway. Finally after passing through a hole in a corrugated fence and across a dry, dusty field we were at his home.

What we had in front of us was a disused church. Its main hall divided into separate living quarters for a number of tenants. My new friend – Mustafa – lived with his brother and his two sons in a partitioned section somewhere towards the far corner. It was barely 2m wide and maybe 6m long. Within the flimsy walls there were two internal partitions: one for a kitchen and another for the bathroom. The partitioned walls were just 8ft high with no ceiling – we were still relying on the church for that. The sounds from a score of busy families echoed around the expansive hall. Pots rattled, children played, chairs scraped. He motioned me in, dusted down a sofa and invited me to sit.

It was only when I took my position within his household that I realised the nonsense that was running through my head just moments before. I knew that it was a good idea to be suspicious but I tend to be overly cautious. Mustafa meanwhile was doing his very best to be a gracious host – you could see that this was an occasion for him. He brought out two glasses of sweet tea and we sipped and talked as best we could. His children were suspicious of me first of all but as with all kids under, say, 7yrs all it took was a couple of jokes or pulling funny faces and you start to gain their trust. Within half an hour we were wrestling on the sofa every time their dad turned his back.

He introduced me to his brother, explained how the children’s mother had died and now the two of them had to bring up the children. They were market traders and were grateful to have a good job. Between them they would bring home about 90dr. I forget the conversion rates exactly but it was around £6 per day - enough to keep them in this place. It was clean and dry and there was a roof over their heads..... albeit with another 20 families. And the kids were happy kids – full of innocence and mischief – the best kind of kids. Mustafa and his brother were doing a good job and I felt very lucky indeed.

By the end of the evening Mustafa walked me back to the hotel and wished me well. He didn't ask for money, he didn't even mention it and suddenly I was ashamed at the presumption of a scam. He just asked to keep in touch. He had a hotmail address but admitted he didn't know how to use a computer. I said I'd send him some instructions in an email..... sometimes my own stupidity staggers me.

Above everything else, throughout my travels in Morocco, that one afternoon showed me more of the country than wandering through the Medinas and Souqs ever could. For the first time I felt that I'd really got under the pelt of a country and seen something that a regular tourist never would. I got delusions of grandeur that this separated me from the package holidaymakers – almost desperate for that segregation but really I just got lucky on a look-in. I'll take it all the same. Perhaps the biggest present of all was the one I never got to send home after all but instead kept safe inside.

CORFU - BRINDISI FERRY

I had a good time at the Pink Palace – it served its purpose well. As a place to meet people, have fun with and to swap stories. And who cared if they were largely half my age, who cared that I should've been doing this 10, 15yrs ago. I was doing it now, before it was too late and the little things like that - those five days in Corfu - allowed me to believe that age didn't really matter at all unless you wanted it to.

With everybody gone I was left to my own devices in the departure lounge. I killed time by getting a bite to eat before making my way back to the terminal to wait for the ferry. The notice board flickered up a new message - that it wouldn't be departing until 1am now. It mattered little. All the tiny trivialities that would normally wind me up had seeped away long ago – this was just part and parcel of travelling now. I still get a little anxious going to a new country but it's more of a nervous excitement than the conventional anxiety. Also part and parcel. Slowly I think I was becoming the traveller I wanted to be.

Once onboard the ferry we were finally directed, curiously, to the bar. It seemed strange to me but this was the 'chair' class where I was supposed to sleep. This was made a tad more difficult as it was also a fully blown nightclub, banging out trance and various techno genres through a tacky Kaleidoscope light show that you'd normally find on your Windows Media Player. For a person who thought that Zeppelins fourth album was pretty much the best music known to mankind, you may imagine, a trance club didn't exactly go down well. I wasn't expecting a cup of Horlicks, a fluffy pillow and Enya piped through to me but not this. My opinions of Techno and Trance are not favourable. Typically if I want to induce that kind of headache then I can drink a shotglass of antifreeze and then repeatedly banging my head against a wardrobe door! I find the effect remarkably similar.

I went back down to the porter and told him that he must be kidding. Not in Greek, mind you but literally shouting at him “YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME!” I mean; give me a hallway to sleep in, a cupboard – anything! but not this. He gave me nothing more than a blank, bored look. So that was the way it was for the next five hours. For someone who'd decided, it would be better to wipe himself out for the day so that he could sleep better at night, this was not what I was expecting.

'Chair' class could've been better. I was given a nasty, hard, high-armed semi-circular chair to try and sleep in. My neck – unsupported – lulled awkwardly from one shoulder to the other like it had been snapped. They thankfully closed the nightclub at 4am leaving the rest of the morning to get some much needed sleep but that never happened either. We were all very unceremoniously woken up and told to move upstairs where we had to get comfortable all over again. Pray; where was this option when I boarded at 1am? I couldn't do it and ended up sleeping on the floor. To be honest, I knew better by now. You never really get a good nights sleep on these things unless you get a cabin but this was made unnecessarily difficult. If I never use Maritime Way again I wouldn't be that disappointed.

Sun stabbed it's way through the slithers within the curtains like Rapiers, like Lasers until the senses awakened fully. I had got maybe 2hrs sleep – about the same as what I would've got from a night-bus. I looked out of the window to find that we'd pulled into port but had to wait an unusually long time before we could disembark. I didn't mind at all. It gave me a chance to clear the sleep from my eyes and the dreams from my head until, suddenly, I was back into the reality of things. I was now in Italy and the merest thought of that made me smile a weak, tired smile within myself.

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